Saturday, August 30, 2014

7th EPISTLE TO THE NEVADANS

Do
We Have Anything Of Interest To Say?

Three things recently collided in my head and
left me with a disturbing concern about 21st Century churches. But
let me preface this by saying my concern arises in the midst of an encouraging
context. Episcopal congregations in Nevada that had once abandoned the project
of education and formation are actively engaging that work again. Congregations
large and small, urban and rural are waist deep in the 2nd Mark of
Mission, teaching and nurturing new believers. Here as elsewhere, the
congregations that offer education strongly tend to have better worship
attendance, stewardship, and community outreach. The Episcopal Church has made
a powerful commitment to education with the Covenant for Adult Formation and
Lifelong Learning. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/adult-formation-lifelong-learning But while much of the Church is abuzz with
learning, that very enthusiasm casts in sharp relief those congregations that have
lost the faith that we have anything distinctive, helpful, or interesting to
say.

The event that set off my concern was asking a group of Church leaders what they thought a person might need to know in order to live
the Christian life. They had various good ideas about the how of Christian education but when it came to what we need to teach, the content
of a core curriculum, they were stumped. I might have hoped they would say the
life and teachings of Jesus, Holy Scripture, the Creeds, the rituals, the
examples of the saints, the story of salvation, moral teachings about theological
and cardinal virtues, the stuff that makes us who we are. But none of them
named anything that anyone needed to actually know in order to practice Christianity well. These are not marginal
Church attenders. They are our best and our brightest. I mean this as no criticism of those Church leaders, but as a question about what has happened to the Anglican ethos that our best and brightest do not have a sense that the faith has a core content to be imparted. This is so foreign to the thinking Episcopal Church I have long
known and loved. It is so foreign to the Church where one of 10 reasons to join
it is “you don’t have to check your mind at the door.”

Once I might have jumped to the conclusion that this
rejection of catechesis per se was a
uniquely Nevada problem – that it reflected the anti-academic/ anti-intellectual
culture of our state. But the other thing already rolling around in my consciousness
told me in no uncertain terms that the Nevada Church leaders were far from
alone. I had just been reading Huston Smith’s Beyond The Post Modern Mind. Smith offers a broad brush sweeping
intellectual/ theological history of Western Civilization moving from the
Christian View of a personal relational reality in which ultimate values were
knowable through reason and revelation from a personal God but the material
world was a puzzlement; to the Modern View in which the material world was
perfectly knowable and controllable through science but anything not
scientifically provable was sheer fantasy; to the Post Modern View in which
nothing either spiritual or material is really knowable, provable, sayable, or
meaningful, and to say anything at all is suspect as it might repress something
someone else might be silently thinking.

What could Christians say in the Post-Modern World View? According
to Smith, not much. Basically we were reduced to: “We don’t actually know
anything. But we hope it’s going to be alright somehow and we invite you to
hold our hand while we hope and act as if this whole human project might mean
something even though we haven’t a clue what it is.” Just so, our Church
leaders thought personal relationships and the fellowship of Church (holding
our hand) were important to help people feel better, but they didn’t have a clear
sense that there is anything important we have to say.

Smith’s basic point would have been intuitively obvious to most of
the people who have ever lived, but for us it is a controversial
counter-cultural claim. The point: we
need a worldview. Without a worldview that says something about right and wrong,
true and false, meaningful and meaningless, we have no roadmap. We are lost in
the Post Modern maze. That is why it is so important for us to think, to speak,
and to ask questions about the big issues. For thousands of years, we have
dared to speak albeit humbly about great things. To despair of speaking is to
despair of encountering. Such despair makes our world small and desperate. To
live effectively in the world one needs a frame of reference, a worldview. Such
a worldview, Smith says, can be expressed in narratives (hence people need to
know the great stories), but only up to a point. Conflicting narratives have to
be reconciled by philosophy and theology.

Post Modernity’s radical skepticism has rejected both narrative and
the right of theology or philosophy to say anything about the source,
foundation, destiny, or meaning of life. It rejects these sources of truth in
order to unfetter the creative individual. Radical skepticism, however, has not
produced a burst of creative individual genius but rather a splitting of the
world into two mobs: one of unthinking nihilistic despair and another mob of unthinking
fundamentalist absolutism. We do need to get on beyond the postmodern mind and we need to get beyond it right away
because it is causing intolerable wrongs. Christians cannot help us get beyond Post Modernity by placing our
hands over our mouths and inviting people to coffee hour.

The third thing rolling about in my mind and banging up against our
doubt that we have anything to say is a recent blockbuster of a book by my
favorite systematic theologian, David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. I love this
book, book but don’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t speak the language of
academic philosophy and metaphysics. It’s a jargon and Hart speaks it with a
razor sharp aggressive polemical wit. First, he demonstrates that the
philosophical assumptions of both modernity and post modernity are themselves
irrational leaps of faith. Noting Heisenberg’s insight that “The answers nature
gives us depend on the questions we ask,” he shows that the scientific
challenges to faith are for the most part a dogmatic and irrational refusal of
philosophical materialists to think outside their own arbitrarily constructed box.

For example, some brain scientists observe that thoughts about God
correspond to neurological activities in the brain. They then make the irrational
leap to conclude that those neurological activities cause the thoughts and God
does not actually exist. Even the arch atheist David Hume knew that such
assertions are an utterly subjective speculation posing as fact. In all
likelihood the scientists’ observations and interpretations correspond to
chemical processes in their brains, which by their own reasoning means their
observations and interpretations are fantasy. Nothing new in this. Kant told us
about it in the 18th Century.

Hart goes on to argue convincingly that great thinkers like Plato
and Kant have not been proven wrong by subsequent science or philosophy but
rather they are simply “out of fashion.” The Post Modern worldview has not been
shown superior to earlier beliefs. It is merely the prevailing fashion.

But the prevailing fashion is not working. It has nothing to say to
Ferguson, Missouri about justice and reconciliation (words that Postmodernity renders
as nullities). It has nothing to say about tolerance and the sacredness of
human life and dignity to Iraq, Syria, or Gaza.

The Christian worldview, on the other hand, has a lot to say about
justice and reconciliation. The whole complex image of atonement sustains our
defined mission “to reconcile all people to God and to each other in Christ.”
We have a lot to say about the sacredness of human life and dignity coming from
our doctrines of Creation and Incarnation. “O God who wonderfully created and
yet more wonderfully restored the dignity of humankind . . . . .” At a minimum
the Christian worldview deserves to be known before it is

rejected. But if people are
going to know it, someone has to teach it.

Smith makes a cogent case for having a worldview. He favors one in
sync with the broad truths he calls “The Perennial Philosophy” of which Christianity
is one expression. Hart makes a cogent case for the intellectual credibility of
the Christian worldview. Reality clearly has “a whence and a whither” as Karl
Rahner puts it. This dazzling part-chaos part-cosmos miracle into which we have
been flung and are flailing about arose somehow from something and is headed
somewhere. We experience truth, beauty, and goodness along the way. (Yes, I
know that’s Platonist and so “out of fashion” but fashion doesn’t make truth,
beauty, and goodness go away.) Can we help but imagine that there is a deepest
truth, a most splendid beauty, a greatest value? (Yes I know that’s
foundationalist [St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas] and so “out of fashion” –
but would things having a foundation be so bad? – the indigenous people of
North America imagined this continent floating on a giant sea turtle – we don’t
have to say what the foundation is in order to hope that there is one – but
once we have imagined that there is a foundation, might we consider that it might
express itself to humans in human form – and then we get to Jesus). Speaking of
great things is risky. It can lead to scary stuff like faith, hope, and love.

I will grant without a hint of a quibble that only a small
percentage of any congregation attends educational programs. But they are the
yeast in the community loaf. Galatians 5:9; Matthew 13:33. In The Heart Of The Parish: A Theology Of The
Remnant, Martin Thornton argued that clergy and other key leaders would do
the church and the world more good by focusing their energy on building up that
core group, the heart of the parish, so that they can serve the rest of the
congregation and the world outside. Instead we clergy tend to invest most of
our time and energy in the folks at the edge of the community who are more apt
to be in crisis. Certainly it is crucial to serve the people at the edges and
beyond, but that begs the question of who should do it. Thornton thought we
needed to attend most closely to empowering the heart of the parish, the 20% of
the people who do 80% of the work, to do ministry. We do that chiefly through
education and formation programs.

I have been surprised to hear Episcopalians embrace the Post Modern
premise that we should not teach people Christian beliefs because it might make
them dogmatic, rigid, and arrogant. Granted the ego can warp anything, but in
my experience the less people know the more dogmatic, rigid, and arrogant they
are about the little they do know (or think they know.) The less educated the
congregation the more bombastic it is apt to be. That may be why the radical
skepticism of Post Modernity and the fanaticism of fundamentalism have come to
the fore together.

Smith’s reminds us that the Perennial Philosophy sets all its truth
claims in the context of reverent mystery for the Unknowable. The greatest
Christian theologians (e.g., Karl Rahner) maintain that we cannot say anything
about God with certainty. We can only use metaphorical language, like the
Creeds, to point toward God. At least since the 6th Century (Dionysius
the Aereopagite) we have admitted that everything we say about God is more
wrong than it is right. So education, if it is honest, does not produce
dogmatism, arrogance, and rigidity – quite the opposite. It promotes curiosity,
humility, and tolerance.

While we stand silent about Christian belief, less progressive
voices speak all too loudly and so define “Christian” in ways that are
unhelpful. When I discovered the Episcopal Church, I wanted to embrace it, but
there was a huge barrier. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement made no
sense to me at all. It was morally and spiritually repugnant. But the
Christianity I had known up to then made substitutionary atonement the
cornerstone of faith. A priest explained that my roadblock doctrine had not
been taught for the first 1000 years of Christianity and that there were
multiple other salvific interpretations of the cross. That opened the door for
me. But if we do not teach Christian beliefs, will there be anyone to open that
door for future seekers as that priest opened the door for me?

I suspect the real reason we do not teach in our churches is that
we do not feel competent to do so. But we do not have to be great Bible
scholars, systematic theologians, or church historians to introduce
Christianity 101. There are plenty of excellent resources that make it imminently
do-able. These are a few suggested by Julia McCray Goldsmith of the Diocese of
California:

Teaching the core of the
faith can be as simple as playing a video then inviting people to talk about it
out of their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. We can stir each other’s
hearts and minds to deeper wisdom and richer life.

5 comments:

I like what you had to say. I want to emphasize that the great Majority of leaders do not teach Christianity and the Episcopal Tradition as you suggest because they are part of the post modern thinking, perhaps unawares, but nevertheless. I see and experience most of our current leadership caught up in fear, success driven,& lack of self understanding to the point of not being able to be prophetic, and to teach that is needed. Our c(C)hurch has long been a victim of cultural captivity. Thank you!

Ben, an interesting and helpful perspective. Do you know Neibuhr's classic Christ & Culture? Anglicanism has always tended toward an easy harmony with the culture. I wonder if that was more comfortable when the culture was more Christian (at least in the sense that the stories, images, and language of faith were evident) -- but in the Post-Modern context, we are more prone to the fear, etc. that you list. Just an off the top of my head speculation. Still I do see some leaders embracing the Covenant for Lifelong Formation and actually engaging the 2nd Mark of Mission. So perhaps there is hope for us yet.

Apparently, it is easy for even clergy to get lost in the contrivances of man, post-modernism, philosophy, etc. and lose sight of the simple message that is Christ our Lord in all things and in all ways. We must always stand apart from mainstream culture in order to keep perspective on who and what we are while knowing that there is nothing more "hip, slick and cool" as being a Christian! :-)

Thanks, it has been a long while since a bishop has responded and neither dismissed nor reacted to my comments. This is hope itself. I also see hope from the laity for the continued life of the gospel of christ, and I hope this spreads to the leadership of the church. Who knows what new structures may become vessels for the news of christ?. I trust that God knows what is as well as what is next.In love and prayer for us all.Ben

Thanks, it has been a long while since a bishop has responded and neither dismissed nor reacted to my comments. This is hope itself. I also see hope from the laity for the continued life of the gospel of christ, and I hope this spreads to the leadership of the church. Who knows what new structures may become vessels for the news of christ?. I trust that God knows what is as well as what is next.In love and prayer for us all.Ben